The file-sharing program at Penn State University has met with tremendous success in its first two weeks.
The agreement between Penn State and Napster, originally signed in October, offers students membership in the file-sharing program as a part of their tuition.
In the first few hours, over 2,000 students signed up for Napster 2.0, and the numbers continued to rise steadily. By the end of the week, approximately 8,000 students had registered, equaling nearly half of the on-campus population.
Thus far, the program is only available to the 17,000 students who reside on the State College, Pa., campus. By next fall, officials hope to extend Napster 2.0 to the off-campus students who compose the remainder of Penn State's population of 83,000.
"The success and reaction to the Napster program has everyone at the university ecstatic," Penn State spokesman Tysen Kendig said.
"We were confident that it would be a successful addition to the student experience and set a trend in higher education over time, so in that sense, we were not surprised."
The program offers three ways to access music. The first two -- using streaming audio and downloading songs onto a hard drive -- are free.
Students who wish to download songs that they can then transfer off of a computer system and onto a CD or MP3 player must pay a small fee for each downloaded track.
"The songs can be paid for with a credit card or Napster gift cards," said Sam Haldeman, special assistant to the associate vice provost of Information Technologies.
"By the end of the semester, students will be able to bursar their music purchases."
Of the 100,000 songs that students downloaded or streamed within the first few hours of the launch, "it is safe to say that the majority of those would have been illegally obtained had we not made this decision," Haldeman said.
Despite some initial student concerns before the Jan. 12 program start, Kendig said he had "not heard of any negative reaction, and didn't expect to hear of any once we launched the service and students actually got to hear all that it has to offer."
"It's certainly been a top hit this semester, and we expect it to stay that way for a long time."
While the administration at Penn currently has no plans of offering a legal downloading service, it is "exploring options similar to Penn State's Napster service," said Dave Millar, University Information Security officer.
Millar said that people who continue to download music illegally are increasingly subject to lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America.
"Most importantly, people need to know that if they share copyrighted files without permission, they are personally liable and may face significant fines," Millar added.
"With all the commercial options available for legal file sharing, from iPod to Wal-Mart and everything in between, people are wise to only download files legally."
